Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original relations,though we continued on the best terms.Notwithstanding my inability to settle to anything,—which I hope arose out of the restless and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,—I had a taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of Herbert’s was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.
Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles.I was alone, and had a dull sense of being alone.Dispirited and anxious,long hoping that to-morrow or next week would clear my way,and long disappointed,I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.
It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet;and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets.Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East,and it drove still,as if in the East there were an eternity of cloud and wind.So furious had been the gusts,that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs;and in the country, trees had been torn up,and sails of windmills carried away;and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast,of shipwreck and death.Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind,and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.
Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time,and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then,nor is it so exposed to the river.We lived at the top of the last house,and the wind rushing up the river shook the house that night,like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a sea.When the rain came with it and dashed against the windows,I thought, raising my eyes to them as they rocked,that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse.Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows (opening them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out, and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.
I read with my watch upon the table,purposing to close my book at eleven o’clock.As I shut it, Saint Paul’s,and all the many church-clocks in the City—some leading,some accompanying, some following—struck that hour.The sound was curiously flawed by the wind;and I was listening,and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it,when I heard a footstep on the stair.
What nervous folly made me start,and awfully connect it with the footstep of my dead sister,matters not. It was past in a moment,and I listened again,and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out,I took up my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head.Whoever was below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking down.
“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.
“What floor do you want?”
“The top. Mr. Pip.”
“That is my name.—There is nothing the matter?”
“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice.And the man came on.
I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail,and he came slowly within its light.It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book,and its circle of light was very contracted;so that he was in it for a mere instant,and then out of it. In the instant,I had seen a face that was strange to me,looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me.
Moving the lamp as the man moved,I made out that he was substantially dressed,but roughly, like a voyager by sea.That he had long iron-grey hair.That his age was about sixty.That he was a muscular man, strong on his legs,and that he was browned and hardened by exposure to weather.As he ascended the last stair or two,and the light of my lamp included us both, I saw,with a stupid kind of amazement,that he was holding out both his hands to me.
“Pray what is your business?” I asked him.
“My business?” he repeated, pausing. “Ah!Yes. I will explain my business, by your leave.”
“Do you wish to come in?”
“Yes,” he replied; “I wish to come in, master.”
I had asked him the question inhospitably enough,for I resented the sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face. I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he expected me to respond to it. But I took him into the room I had just left, and, having set the lamp on the table, asked him as civilly as I could to explain himself.
He looked about him with the strangest air,—an air of wondering pleasure,as if he had some part in the things he admired,—and he pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat.Then, I saw that his head was furrowed and bald,and that the long iron-grey hair grew only on its sides.But, I saw nothing that in the least explained him.On the contrary, I saw him next moment,once more holding out both his hands to me.
“What do you mean?” said I, half suspecting him to be mad.
He stopped in his looking at me,and slowly rubbed his right hand over his head.“It’s disapinting to a man,” he said,in a coarse broken voice,“arter having looked for’ard so distant,and come so fur; but you’re not to blame for that,—neither on us is to blame for that.I’ll speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute, please.”
He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire,and covered his forehead with his large brown veinous hands.I looked at him attentively then,and recoiled a little from him; but I did not know him.
“There’s no one nigh,” said he,looking over his shoulder; “is there?”
“Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the night, ask that question?” said I.
“You’re a game one,” he returned,shaking his head at me with a deliberate affection,at once most unintelligible and most exasperating;“I’m glad you’ve grow’d up, a game one!But don’t catch hold of me.You’d be sorry arterwards to have done it.”
I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him!Even yet I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him!If the wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years,had scattered all the intervening objects,had swept us to the churchyard where we first stood face to face on such different levels, I could not have known my convict more distinctly than I knew him now as he sat in the chair before the fire. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need to take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head; no need to hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he gave me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been conscious of remotely suspecting his identity.
He came back to where I stood,and again held out both his hands.Not knowing what to do,—for,in my astonishment I had lost my self-possession,—I reluctantly gave him my hands.He grasped them heartily, raised them to his lips,kissed them, and still held them.
“You acted noble, my boy,” said he. “Noble, Pip!And I have never forgot it!”
At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me,I laid a hand upon his breast and put him away.